The iPhone showed that it is possible to squeeze the real web into the users’ pockets. But there are still limitations, the big one being support for third party plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight and different media players.

An article on TechCrunch showing how to access the NBC Olympics Silverlight 2 player from a Nokia phone really caught my attention. Sure, Nokia have announced Silverlight Mobile support, but no details are available yet, and certainly not a public beta. It turns out Skyfire, the browser used to watch Silverlight 2 content on the mobile, takes a completely different approach to mobile browsing than the iPhone. On the iPhone you’re running the full Safari browser, doing all the heavy lifting on the device. The Skyfire browser uses remote rendering of the page. This is similar to the Operas successful mobile browser, which uses a proxy that downloads the page and recompresses images and re-arranges the HTML to a format better suited for mobile devices. The Skyfire takes this approach one step further and does all the rendering on the server and having the mobile device act as some sort of remote desktop client. Their FAQ is fairly cryptic about the details of how the rendering is done, and they obviously have done some smart things to make this fast enough to stream to a mobile device.

Q: How is Skyfire able to render the PC Web?
A: Skyfire's proprietary technology enables us to support the real web both now and in the future as new web technologies are implemented. We have created a brand new architecture that's server assisted. It's an asymmetric distributed approach where the server does the heavy lifting so the client is high performing.

Q: Seriously, how does Skyfire do all of this?
A: The only way we can tell you this is if you join our team. We're hiring bright, passionate folks who want to completely change the way the Internet works on mobile phones.

Skyfire is currently in private beta, running on Nokia Series 60 phones and Windows Mobile 5 and 6. I’m using the iPhone, and haven’t been able to try the browser myself. But I strongly recommend checking out this video showing the NBC Olympics Silverlight player on a Nokia device.

Is this the future of mobile browsing? I don’t know – And I have no idea if this would be able to scale. I’m not sure if Skyfire is talking to their back-end server which does the rendering, or if Skyfire includes both a mobile client, and something you have to install on your local PC to get it to render your page, upload it to Skyfire servers, and then stream it down to your device... No matter which approach they take, the demos do look impressive.